"I want to be the second Greta Garbo. No, I don't either. I want to be the first Jean Darling and make pictures like Greta's, only better."
That was the statement to the press of Jean Darling, 8, in the lobby of the Kirkwood hotel Wednesday (the 18th). Jean is a star of "Our Gang" comedies.
Jean says she's beginning to get just a little tired of comedies. "They're so easy. It's just like playing with no camera before you. I'd like to try something harder and a bit more technical."
Wants to Feel "Lines."
Jean explained that even the talkies are easy, that juvenile actors and actresses don't have to memorize a lot of lines. "They tell you just what to say before every shot," she said. "I wish they wouldn't. I'd rather memorize them and feel that I was really saying them myself, than that I was just repeating something somebody else said that I was supposed to say."
"What do you s'pose I did the last night I was in Hollywood?' she asked.
"Mother Wasn't There."
"We were in a hammock. It was bright moonlight and mother wasn't there."
From which, those present took it that Jean has a "boy friend."
"His first name's Freeman - I won't tell you his last. But he's awful nice, especially in the moonlight," she said.
Jean doesn't pay much attention to the rest of the boys - "but I have to answer their letters and send them a picture cause they ask me to, and I wouldn't want to fall down on my friends," she concluded.
Jean is in the city for an engagement at the Orpheum theater.